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Getting started

Introduction

Direct Debit is an automated payment method which allows you to pull payments from your customers’ bank accounts.

The GoCardless API is a wrapper around diverse national Direct Debit systems in the UK, Eurozone and Sweden, allowing you to collect payments everywhere with one integration.

There are three key parts to an integration with the API - you can do one, two or all three of them:

Setting up mandates with your customers’ bank accounts

Collecting payments against your mandates

Staying up-to-date with webhooks

Alongside the API, you’ll have access to the GoCardless Dashboard which you can also use to manage your account.

If you want to allow your users to collect and manage their own payments through your application, you’ll want to build a partner integration using our OAuth API. To get started, check out our partners guide.

This means that, for example, you could choose to add your customers through your website using an API integration, but bill them manually through the Dashboard.

In this guide, we’ll get you up and running with the GoCardless API. You’ll add your first customer, collect your first payment and set up webhooks to stay up to date on the status of your payments. The guide includes code samples in PHP, Ruby, Python, and Java.